In the flesh, she doesn't have an aura. She isn't lit from within. Heads do not snap in her direction when she walks through a hotel lobby in a baggy maxi-dress and brown calf-high boots, flanked by her dutiful makeup artist of 35 years and her imperious publicist -- the few celebrity trappings of a woman who stubbornly considers herself a working actor and nothing more.

In the flesh, she doesn't have an aura. She isn't lit from within. Heads do not snap in her direction when she walks through a hotel lobby in a baggy maxi-dress and brown calf-high boots, flanked by her dutiful makeup artist of 35 years and her imperious publicist -- the few celebrity trappings of a woman who stubbornly considers herself a working actor and nothing more.

Infamous, X-rated Deep Throat, which sparked as much 1972 water-cooler discussion as The Godfather, is said to have returned $600 million on a $25,000 investment. But now there are added wonders that refuse to cease.

Extravagantly conceived and gloriously realized, Angels in America is not just one of the best television movies ever made it's also a transcendent work of art. Watching Angels is an ecstatic experience, one that uplifts both your spirits and a medium that so often prefers to be degraded.

When Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Angels in America opened on Broadway in 1993, concern about AIDS pervaded Hollywood and headline news. Today, the syndrome gets less high-profile press, and discussion tends to focus more on its virulent growth in other parts of the world than the devastation it has caused, and is still causing, at home.